Palantir’s Manifesto Is a New Class Plan Reshaping the System’s Power Structure

The internet exploded with criticism of Palantir’s manifesto. Understandably so. It is an open call for a private company to take over government programs and decide policy. It is an acknowledgment by the party that they have sufficient power to state their claim clearly.

I’ve been arguing for different ways of analyzing what I consider to be the trend of events in the US and, by extension, much of the world in recent years. A new class of people has arrived at the highest levels of system power through the development of new digital technologies that have allowed them to amass great wealth and, through the use of that technology, wield great influence.

The way we work, communicate, eat, travel, and even relax is now guided by their technology. That not only allows the owners of that technology to extract rent and monitor our behavior, but also to influence it. We have come to rely on their hardware and software devices to perform some of the most common daily tasks, such as checking the weather.

The people who develop and manage this technology are not an invisible group. There are countless unknown foot soldiers, middle managers, and small businessmen—I have relatives involved—just doing their jobs. But there is also a defined group with well-known faces, such as Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, or Mark Zuckerberg, and others who are not very well-known, such as Alexander Karp (although he longs to be in a well-known group), David Sacks, Balaji Srinivasan, or Palmer Luckey.

There are others who are arguably less ideologically motivated, like Zuckerberg or Bezos, but who nevertheless surround the core group and follow their lead. Look, for example, when Zuckerberg published a video, after Trump took office for the second time, where he abandoned some of his company’s previous policies to align with the new administration, which was supported by this core group.

This core group is a cohesive network of inventors, venture capitalists, and intellectuals—including Nick Land and Curtis Yarvin—who control some of the largest hardware and software companies, venture capital, and media companies. They have their own think tanks, usually podcasts, like the “All-In Podcast,” but they also publish books and articles, and they give back to public-facing institutions, politicians and campaigns. They have a specific vision—although, as with any group, there are different strands—of what the world is and how society should function.

At the core of this group’s ideology—often called the “Thielverse” or the “New Right” of Silicon Valley—is a combination of high optimism in technology, deep skepticism about modern democracy, and a desire to rebuild the world by “Getting Out” instead of revolution (ie, acceleration). They support politicians who can help them achieve those goals, for example, Donald Trump, and are ideologically committed to Israel.

Through their companies and their financial support, they have extended their influence to the US government. They helped finance Trump’s campaign and made JD Vance, a longtime Thiel supporter and staffer, vice president. In exchange, they gained access to sensitive data of citizens through the DOGE, classified information on government and defense contracts of their companies, such as Anduril or Palantir, and government finances to create their control mechanisms: data centers and computer algorithms. They have become part of the military-industrial complex, forming an alliance between Tel Aviv, Washington, and Silicon Valley.

This is the context in which Palantir’s recently published manifesto should be understood. It is not just a memorandum with words to comply with the current trend of ideas, as many companies have been issuing mission statements including protecting the environment or “diversity” in the past few years. It is their political plan expressed through the mission statement of one of the leading companies, which has become so important to the government that we don’t know where one ends and the other begins.

Nat published a piece when the manifesto came down that is an excellent roundup of reactions and analysis—some of which will be highlighted here again for argument’s sake. But if you haven’t read the manifesto, you should. Here is the link.

There has been a sobering analysis of what Palantir’s manifesto entails. For example, Varoufakis took the time to write what they actually meant by the 22 points. According to him, the true meaning of the first point is:

Silicon Valley owes an immeasurable debt to the ruling class that freed the criminal bankers who ruined the lives of so many Americans. Silicon Valley’s engineering elite will defend that ruling class to the death (literally!), on behalf of the majority of Americans they treat with contempt – that is, like cattle that have lost their market value.

This points to a very interesting variable that Varoufakis has detailed elsewhere. We’ll get back to it. Let’s continue what Arnaud Bertrand said:

Basically they advocate a conflict of civilization worldview where there is a “them” – assumed to be the enemies of Western civilization, whose culture is coded as inferior – and “us” who should stop indulging in immorality and invest heavily in AI weapons and defense software (which easily makes Palantir’s product heal the catalog of civilizations).

I believe this is a result of the binary thinking—0 and 1—that supports their worldview. They are glorified software engineers, after all. Another X user, he adds, commenting on one of the lines in the manifesto:

“The strongest power in this century will be built on software” is the main sentence of the entire manifesto because that is where Karp presents the real thesis; he says that whoever controls the national security software layer, controls the nation itself.

Christophe Boutry, writing in French (machine translation), further elaborates on that thought:

If a private company sets itself the goal of defining who must be watched, directed, predicted, removed from office, and at the same time publishes a document explaining why competition can be a weakness of civilization, we are no longer in business strategy. We are in the privatization of the monarchy. The right to decide on an enemy—always a political act that establishes countries—is being bought by a Nasdaq-listed company.

Finally, Alexander Dugin, after calling the manifesto “Pure satanism. Ayn Rand. The logical end of the capitalist age,” says:

Techno-fascism is on the rise. The masks are off. Palantir is open about its plans. That means that they have reached the top positions in ruling the world.

When we identify these different points of analysis as referring to a single group, not an abstract entity, a pattern becomes clear and a picture begins to emerge:

The system’s political and financial elites have invested in the development of a digital industrial base that can replace lost productivity. This digital industrial base was based in Silicon Valley, which had a history of technological innovation. Investment came in waves. For example, in the 1960s, NASA obtained 60% of the integrated circuits needed for the space race from companies established there.

The digital revolution, brought about by the personal computer, the Internet, and the smartphone, also saw explosive waves of investment and mergers. But this was still the hardware era. Profits came, mainly, from selling tools. And this was constrained by production capacity, global supply chains, and consumer demand.

At the turn of the century, a new and more efficient way to continue to support the market economy was developed after the dot-com bubble: Software as a Service, the application economy, and the growth of social networks. Here, there was an opportunity for growth that was not hindered by previous challenges. In 2008, after the crisis and avoiding a financial collapse, banks and investment funds were bailed out with taxpayers’ money. This was money that went, as an investment, to Silicon Valley. This is what Varoufakis was referring to and what makes Silicon Valley bursting with multi-billion dollar startups.

Some of those engineers, inventors, and business capitalists, who knew each other, were able to obtain incredible wealth and were driven to connect with the power figures of the system. Not just because of the wealth, but also because the technology they were developing was a very useful tool for the government. This group—some call it the “PayPal Mafia” because some of them, like Thiel and Musk, founded that company—came with a different worldview than the average industrialist or global financier.

They believed in technology as a solution to social problems, which they saw as an indicator of the state’s weakness. They believed that technology could surpass people, so we had to meet them. They believed that digital technology could rebuild the world better, but because of that, it had to first reach a point of collapse. They see all this as inevitable. It was a “disruption” ritual.

The basis of these ideas, which have changed into the worldview of Peter Thiel even talking about the antichrist, is a dual understanding of the world. They are not even numbers in the mathematical sense; it is literally based on 0’s and 1’s.

For example, at its heart is what they call the “Zero to One” stagnation hypothesis. They say that the West has been in a state of technological and cultural stagnation since the 1970s. While we have seen great progress in “bits” (computers and the Internet), we have failed in “atoms” (energy, transportation, and medicine). They reject economic growth and believe that the only way to save civilization is through direct progress—creating entirely new things (0 to 1) rather than simply improving existing things (1 to N).

Because this group’s thought processes are built on a binary system, their worldview is incredibly narrow: with us or against us. And if you resist us, we have the right to control you, lock you up or kill you. To do that, we will build the tools and system that allow us. But they are not creating a new system, they are only simplifying the current stupid one, down to binary 0’s and 1’s.

Human beings are based on language. In order to envision a different future, we must be able to speak it. Have you ever seen Thiel or Musk speak? They groan.

The reason for the rise of this group is the reorganization of the powerful group of the system. In order to stay, they drive others away. And that creates conflict. This is then updated through the system. But the system will discard the useless, fix it, and move on. Which is, I believe, the source of much of what we see happening in the US and, by extension its diminishing reach, the world.

Palantir’s manifesto is a plan for a new phase that reshapes the upper parts of the system’s power structure, and it feels confident enough to say it publicly.